Bradford City Councilman Tom Riel agreed Tuesday night at a
council meeting to table a resolution offering free parking
temporarily on Main Street while more information is gathered about
the issue.

At work session held prior to the meeting, council members
discussed the pros and cons of taking out parking meters in the
downtown Historic District.

“This is not a simple issue as far as I’m concerned,” said
Councilman Dan Costello. “Number one, the city would be losing
revenue. Number two, would it really help the merchants downtown
with getting sales and customers into their stores? And number
three, enforcement. We can’t just open up parking downtown.

“(Enforcement) is also regulating parking. It’s getting people
moving in and out of Main Street,” Costello said.

Mayor Michele Corignani said that during a time when enforcement
of metered parking was suspended in the past, out of a total of 73
spaces available on Main Street, 37 vehicles were parked there for
at least eight hours.

“They were employees or business owners,” she said, not
customers shopping at downtown stores.

Last year when city meters had to be recertified and enforcement
was suspended for five weeks, “no business owners came to us and
said this was great,” Corignani said.

“The amount of revenue we would lose, it’s already been budgeted
for the year, how do we make it up?” Corignani asked.

Main Street Manager Diane DeWalt presented some information she
gathered from other communities who have dealt with removing
metered parking or with alternate forms of parking enforcement.

Some options are to record license plates to track that business
owners or employees are not taking advantage of the free parking,
raising the rates of parking tickets to counter lost revenue and to
put a time limit on the free parking.

Riel agreed with DeWalt’s findings, saying that all those are
options that could be considered.

“My concern is that we’ve had trial periods by accident and by
our control in order to help the merchants,” Corignani said,
describing periods of free parking. However, she said, she’s never
seen any numbers to say that it benefited the merchants.

“My main question is how is the revenue going to be compensated?
I don’t want to get to December and find that we’re $10-or-12,000
short,” she added.

Riel said again that the revenue lost could be countered with
increased fines, that enforcement could be done to make sure cars
weren’t parking past an agreed upon length of time and that a trial
period for the plan before next year’s budget is drawn up would be
a good idea.

“I believe it’s what the remaining people downtown want,” Riel
said.

City Clerk John Peterson then raised a concern about people who
rent parking spaces in private lots, saying they might be tempted
to leave the lots to take advantage of the free parking
instead.

“You enforce it!” yelled local resident Vince Vicere. “You can
have all the meters you want downtown but you don’t have the
stores! Nobody knows what Bradford has. We need somebody with a
vision. Every time somebody comes up with an idea, you say it won’t
work. Well, try it.”

Resident Helen Burfield spoke out in favor of leaving the meters
in and enforcing parking. She said that she walks all over town,
and sees “cuckoopots” parking in places where they shouldn’t be,
blocking access for buses and emergency vehicles.

The work session lasted for more than an hour. Riel addressed
the issue of parking enforcement again at the council meeting after
that, saying he would reintroduce a resolution after some
“fine-tuning” and after he gathered some additional
information.